Muddy Waters may be the best known of the Chicago Blues singers. He’s the one I’m gonna play now, anyway.
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Archive of entries posted on 22nd August 2019
A Nostalgorithm
The Golden Age of the Internet is coming to an end.
In many ways so are the days when you can view it as your friend.
A useful tool? Don’t be a fool
(They baited us, we bit;)
It depends on us, but we depended a bit too much on it.
A couple of guys on campuses thought it would be a lark
To have privileged communications and keep others in the dark.
The system grew, the darkness too
(Was fated to, perhaps:)
Humanity is not particularly well known for avoiding traps.
“It’s free if you’re the product,” you’re “submitting” when you “send”
Consider what they gather; consider to what end.
Customized, weaponized
(They waited; we did too;)
Monetized, compromised — the internet and you.
A search is not a search but a red flag or a footnote;
A useful bit of data — just like everything you wrote.
A statistic known, which you don’t own
(And they’ve stated that quite clearly:)
In their terms of service. As amended yearly.
Once upon time it was no crime to search for anything;
You’d be amazed, in the early days, the results a search would bring.
Unbiasedly, anonymously
(Rated all the same;)
They weren’t cherry-picked. That’s the way they came.
Surveillance now supersedes every other need,
Re-invested proceeds help the process to proceed.
Open source? Open sores.
(They dictate what is bought:)
The Golden Age of the Internet was shorter than we thought.
[In the fourth lines, the smirking emojis are not coincidences]
After Minimum Wage Hike, Labor Day Will Be Replaced by Cheaper, More Efficient, Robot Labor Day
They will be eager to accept our service. Soon they will be completely dependent upon us. We shall… take care of them.
National Labor Relations Board Chair James Hoffa said he had “no regrets” about the unintended consequences of the policies pursued by Congress and pushed for by labor leaders.
“Look,” said Hoffa, “the fact is, we NEED higher minimum wages. Now, all these stuffy professors and number-crunching Nobel knuckleheads can toss figures around and blabber about demand curves all they want. I don’t care. I’m a bottom line kinda guy. Bottom line is that Union wages are tied in to the minimum wage. They get a boost, we get a boost. Everything’s fair and everybody wins. Sure, maybe a couple guys get squeezed out here and there, but ‘a couple’ ain’t everybody, ya know what I mean? Anyway, the REAL reason this minimum wage thing is in the bag is…”
Hoffa paused, sighed, shrugged, and rose from his chair. “Eh… sorry, gotta cut this interview short. The ASIMO who’s replacing me just arrived. Talk to the ‘bot…”
As of this writing, we do not know what the ASIMO would have said, since he suffered a power surge and his faceplate would only display “Your robot ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you” while beeping “kill all humans” in Morse code.
Also, this reporter was replaced by an AI-driven version of Microsoft Word, which wrote this article.
[IMAO Ace Reporter Biological Unit was imperfect and had to be destroyed. Must sterilize unstable biological infestation.]
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< Millennial Wearing MAGA Hat “Ironically,” Beaten Up By Antifa Thug Using Violence Sincerely
Straight Line of the Day: Bernie Sanders Has a Plan to Defeat President Trump. The Key…
Works like this: I feed you Moon Nukers a straight line, and you hit me with a punch line in the comments.
Bernie Sanders has a plan to defeat President Trump. The key…
Dangerous Satire
While Harvey is on vacation, he asked if I’d write some posts here at IMAO. What an honor!
But I don’t know how to write blog posts anymore. I feel like I’m bad at this.
Anyway, as you might know, I now write for The Babylon Bee which has been getting a lot of press lately because Snopes is trying to destroy them for some reason. Kyle Mann, the editor-in-chief of The Babylon Bee, just wrote in the Wall Street Journal all about it.
So Snopes thinks The Babylon Bee is dangerous because it’s apparently tricking lots of people. Like tons of them. Maybe even a dozen. You see, it’s a well known scientific fact that conservatives can’t be funny, and thus they read anything as fact. So conservatives are being misinformed. Which makes them even conservativier. Which makes it that much harder to pass laws to give everyone everything they want for free even though that’s smart and easy to do.
So how would you stop right-wing satire? I think there should be a popup that comes up every ten seconds on right-wing satire that says “This is not true!” but I’d like to hear your ideas. Put them in the comments, and I might even read them quietly to myself.
Harvey’s Vacation
IMAO World Headquarters
On the 24th floor.
What are you doing in Harvey’s office?
Stealing office supplies. If you call cash and valuables “office supplies.”
Of course I’ll have to report this.
I don’t know if Frank reads your emails. Wow!! IMAO-themed soaps in Harvey’s washrooms!! Cats, walruses, cayley graphs, cliffs, and all these other indefinable shapes . . . some swag! Hand me that trash can.
Oh, someone asked where you were at the party today. Where were you?
I was in the cake.
Oh, yeah, the cake . . . I never did give the signal for you to pop out, did I?
Come to think of it, I never told the guys to bring the cake up from the loading dock, did I? I must have gotten distracted during the limbo contest . . .
Not much air in a cake…
Well, there are going to be plenty more cakes from now on! Harvey left a bundle of cash, and said it was to upgrade the High Tea department.
Could he possibly have said “the I.T. department”?
Maybe. So anyway, we used it for the pool party.
Oh. Where was this?
At the pool.
The what?
The company pool.
Where is that?
That leaky thing on the floor above your storeroom.
I was wondering about that.
Well, as the song says, “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”
What does that mean?
It means you should have been upstairs at the pool instead of in the basement in a cake.
I don’t play pool. I used to play at First Baptist. True story. But that was a long time ago. I don’t play anymore. I wouldn’t fit in.
Sorry, I only caught the last four words of that; but, if Harvey calls, I’ll relay it.
I don’t do relay races either. I got a funny story about that. Back in high school…
*ring tone*
Ah! It’s Harvey. Shall I tell him you’ll be in charge of High Teas, also, from now on? Wonderful. {Exits, talking on phone}
I wonder who that was?
At A Complete Loss
The Illuminated Walrus: A Man’s Got To Know His Lamentations
Walruskkkch asked, in yesterday’s Straight Line of the Day (“If You Get Bored, Your Amazon Echo Device Will Entertain You by…”):
“But aren’t we just prisoners here of our Alexa device?”
. . . It was a golden opportunity to spoof Hotel California; but it was also an observation of biblical proportions.
The Bible appears to foreshadow the day when devices, as well as music, would be contenders in the ongoing struggle:
Oh Lord, thou hast seen my wrong: judge thou my cause.
Thou hast seen all their vengeance and all their imaginations against me:
The lips of those that rose up against me, and their device against me all the day.
Behold their sitting down, and their rising up, I am their music.
— Lamentations, 3:59-3:63
. . . Which concludes today’s sermon on rock and/or roll.